The Role of Healers in the Healing

In dealing with my Yetzer haRah (see last post), I spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the healer in the healing, and particularly my role in the healing.

I often think of my treatments as creating the space for the healing to happen. My role is connecting to the patient, connecting to God, and then the healing happens. The power for the healing came from God, but I was involved as well. So how do I understand my role? And from that, how do I become a better healer?

I can interpret every treatment as completely God's work in which I am an empty vessel who simply does God's work. In this story, my role is to learn to be empty. There is no particular training needed, no need to work on healing techniques or better needle insertion. There is only one skill - being empty. Whatever path I followed to suppress my ego and become empty is all I need to keep doing to be a better healer. The danger of this path is that one can beat oneself up for having any ego at all, and so get into a rut of self-denial and self-suppression. I think there are people for whom this path works, it's just not who I am.

Another way of describing the treatment is that I can take complete credit for the treatment. I can believe that the whole treatment comes from my power, and there are no greater forces involved. My ego has complete control here. The dangers here are many. The story is all about me, and there is no room for God. This is the story of arrogance, and there is no need for growth - I did such an amazing thing, aren't I wonderful. There is no fears or tears or tensions created that would drive me forward. In this story, I am already perfect.

The challenge is finding a way to tell the story that allows me to have a sense of self, to keep growing, and to acknowledge the role of God. I think it is natural to take joy in our successes. When the harvest comes in, the farmer is joyful, but the farmer knows it is only temporary as it will be soon be time to start planting again.

I know that God played an integral part in the treatment and all the power is his, but I was there too. Is that arrogant to say? Is there a way to tell the story such that I acknowledge the work I did to enable the treatment to be successful?

The farmer knows that just scattering seeds on the soil and waiting won't bring crops to harvest. One needs to do a lot of planning, and hard work to make those plants grow. Ultimately, it's God who makes the plants grow, the rains fall, and who decides if the harvest will be successful. But that doesn't free the farmer from working very hard to create the right conditions in which the crops can succeed.

I think it works this way with healing. I have to work very hard to create the right space, to relax the patient, to place the needles in the right points, to place my hands on the right places - all that so that the healing can happen. My tension for growth is to always get better at my part of the healing. And then when I succeed and the patient gets better, then I feel joy. But like a farmer, I know the joy lasts only until my next treatment when I must begin all over again.

My teacher John once said to me that the Zen concept of not attaching to things is very important. I see it in this case: if I attach to the joy, then it prevents me from growing. If I deny the joy, I am not being honest with myself. If I feel the joy and then let it go and move on, then I can continue to plant and grow.

The story should perhaps be told in this way: A patient came in, I worked hard to create the space for the healing, and then felt joy when God connected to us and helped the client to heal. And then I moved on to the next patient.

A final note:
I wrote this post yesterday. Last night, I was reading The Wings of The Sun by Avraham Greenbaum. In the section on the rabbinic tradition (chapter 4, p. 33), he solves my dilemna by stating that God heals, but he grants the doctors power to heal as God's agents. He continues the point thus:

This latter viewpoint is vividly expressed in a midrash telling of a sick man who approached Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Akiva as they were walking in Jerusalem one day. The sick man asked the two rabbis what he should do to be cured. They gave him a number of recommendations, upon hearing which a farmer who had been listening said to them, "You're interfering in something that's none of your business! God afflicted him with illness and you want to heal him?" "But don't you as a farmer do the same?" they replied. "God created the earth, but you have to plow, till, fertilize and weed if you want the land to yield produce. `As for man, his days are as grass' (Psalms 103:15). The human body is the tree, the medicine is the fertilizer and the physician is the tiller of the earth" (Midrash Shmuel 52a #4).

What amazed me was that my analogy of a farmer was actually a classical one. It's amaizing when things come together like that!

If you follow the link to Wings of the Sun, the entire book is available on-line. It's worth the read: http://www.azamra.org/.

Feeling Joy without arrogance

I finished a treatment last week and smiled. It was a good treatment: there was a lot of power in the room, I had felt a very clear disharmony in the patient's cranial rhythms and was able to return it to proper functioning, and the client was one who I had a personal stake in the treatment's success. It was a patient who is well connected in the local community and I knew that if I was able to give him a successful treatment, it could directly benefit my business.

When the patient left the room, I pumped my fist and smiled a broad smile and said "I did it!" Then I paused and checked in on myself. I hadn't done it. God had done it. The power, the clear vision, the healing the patient felt happened as a result of God working through me, and working directly on the patient. But here I was taking credit for it.

I'm a person who has long struggled with arrogance. In my youth, I think it was a defense mechanism: if I was better than everyone else, then I didn't need to work hard or measure myself by their measures. So if I failed at something, it wouldn't matter to me. Like most things, I think it was generated out of fear. In particular, a fear of not being the best - of not succeeding. So rather than trying and failing, I found a way to convince myself that I didn't need to try. And then, if I failed, I could always say that I failed because I didn't try, but if I had tried, I could have succeeded. I know now that it did matter a great deal to me, but back then I didn't have the tools to succeed, so I fashioned an attitude which allowed me to fail and not feel bad about it. It was neat little knot I had tied myself in.

These days, I'm always worried that the arrogance will come back. So when I find myself taking too much credit for a good treatment, I feel the need to do some introspection. The first place I look is at my fears. I knew there was a small fear that my business wouldn't succeed, but that's always there. I think that I need that fear of business failure needed to keep me motivated to keep working on my business.

There was also the fear that I am not a good practitioner. Again, the fear of not being proficient is necessary to keep me growing. But what I saw was that alongside this fear was my Yetzer haRah (urge to self-destruction). The fear opened a small place inside me when the Yetzer HaRah started telling me to beat myself up over taking joy in a good treatment.

It was an interesting energetic thing - I was not criticizing myself for the quality of my treatment, I was going after myself for my reaction to the treatment. The patient received a good treatment. His symptoms were lessened, and he was in a much better place when he left then when he came.

My feeling on how to overcome the Yetzer HaRah is to be aware of it. I haven't found a lot of traditional sources for ways to deal with it energetically. Most places simply talk about suppressing it or overcoming it, but not much on how to actually do that. I treat it much the same as fear: know when it's present and be aware of it. Then you can decided to listen or not to listen to it, but it no longer has any power over you.

In this case, it was trying to lead me down an old path so that I get caught up in myself and stop moving forward. There is no fault in taking joy in a job well done as long as I realize my role in the treatment and don't take credit for the parts in which I had no part. The tricky part is that this moment can lead me down two opposite bad directions: either getting arrogant and taking all the credit for the treatment, or taking no credit at all and beating myself up for feeling joy. The delicate middle path is where I ended up, but I had to sort out where the energies and inclinations were coming from.

My next post will be about the role of the healer in the healing which was also a result of the same moment as this post.

Zohar 176/a-b - Those who come in and out

I started my new Beit-Midrash today and it gave me several things to think about.

We studied a section from the Zohar, page 176/a-b, parshat Terumah. It's the introduction to Sifra D'Tzniutah, which roughly translates to the Book of Modesty. It reads in my very poor translation:

Who is the one who modest of the book [What is modesty of the book]? R' Shimon said, they are five parts that include the palaces of all, and and fill all of the land. R' Yehudah asked, if they include everything, they are more preferable then all. R' Shimon said thus it is for those who goes in and comes out, but for those who don't come in and go out, it is not thus.

It is told of a man who lived in the mountains and didn't know of the city, he grew wheat and ate the wheat by itself. One day, he came into a city and they gave him good bread. The man said to them, why? They said, bread is for eating. So he ate it and it was very tasty. He asked, from what do you make this? From wheat, they answered. Later, they gave him challahs that were dipped in oil. He tasted them and said from what are these made. From wheat, they said. Later they gave him sweet mixtures kneaded with honey and oil. He said, from what are these made. From wheat, they said. He said, it's certain that I am master of all of these as I eat the essence of all of these, which is wheat.

According to this way of thinking, the refinements [manifestations] of the world are not known, and they are lost. Thus it is for whoever grasps the basic rule but doesn't know all of the useful refinements that come out from the same basic rule.

The five parts are the Torah, which then fills up the world. R' Yehudah suggests then that we just study Torah and nothing else as in it is contained everything. R' Shimon replies that if you are "one who goes in and comes out" then you can do this, otherwise best to study everything. Who is "one who comes in and goes out"?

We then hear a story about a hermit who lives on wheat alone. When he comes into the city and tries all the yummy baked goods that can be made of wheat, he declares himself the master of all these things because he grows and eats wheat. He understands wheat, the basic ingredient in all these things, so he believes that he is master of all things made of wheat. The text then points out to us, if we haven't already gotten there ourselves, that this person is a fool, and anyone who thinks they can be master of a thing just by understanding the basic rules of a thing has really missed the point.

My interpretation of "one who comes in and goes out" is a person who lives in this world. We can study Torah to understand the world, but it's only useful if we are actually participating in the world and seeing how it is made manifest in the world. If we live in seclusion, then all the study is wasted, as we're really missing the point. If a person has trouble being in this world, and is spending all their time in the spiritual world, then studying the deep matters (basic principles of the world) is a problem as they lose sight of the beauty of the physical world.

There are some people have an easier time being in the physical world and need to work to be in the spiritual one, and there are others who are exactly the opposite. Those people have difficulty getting their feet on the ground and staying present in this world. I believe this story is teaching us that if you can be in this world, then it's ok to learn to travel in the spiritual world, but if you have trouble being here, then spend your time learning to enjoy this world. For one who can go into the spiritual world and come back into the physical world, they can extract from the basic principles to all the possibilities. But for someone who is stuck in the spiritual world, they need to concentrate on learning the manifestations in the physical world.

The last question I want to address is actually the first of the text: Who is one who has modesty of the book? If the book is everything in the world, and the book is the essence of all in the world, then modesty of the book would mean that any who understand the deeper workings of the world should be modest about it. If our story man was our bad example, then we learn that even if we understand a deep principle, we don't proclaim ourselves master over it or any of it's refinements, we remain modest and humble, and know that to truly master a thing, we have to understand the basics and all of the possibilities that can come from it.

Honi the circler and a line of power

Tonight I went to see Morgenstern again. The energy felt very good tonight, and I wasn't disappointed.

When we first got there, I had a long conversation with a man there I have met before who seems to take care of a lot of the logistical details around the yeshiva. He had told me earlier of another Hasidic master that I should meet. Tonight I asked him how to get to meet this person. He told me there were several ways: the first was to get accepted into his "Kollel" or adult study where a person receives a stipend to study. Baring that, the easiest way to meet him was to donate money, say, around $1000 or bring people to him that would donate. When I indicated that those weren't good options, he told me that he teaches classes, and if I dressed like a hassid, I could sneak into one of the classes. At that point, I realized that this teacher was probably not someone I'd want to meet with anyway. Too many layers. And I don't want to meet someone for whom I have to pretend to be someone else. So I'll keep looking for other kabbalistic masters.

I also asked him how he experienced Morgenstern's energy. he said it was like light emanating out from him. It was in the sephirah of Keter. An interesting way of talking about it, but not one I understand yet.

During the first talk that Morgenstern gave, I went very deep and felt a lot of power. At first I tried to connect with Morgenstern, but quickly realized that there was another soul right in front of me, above and to the left. Last week, when I was there, I was very sick, and another soul came to the same place. I thought at that point that it was the Amshinover. He pressed into the left side of my head until I finally let him in. He then put a long pole of light down through my head into the center of my body. I asked him what it was and he said: Boundaries. I've been playing with it all week.

Tonight, the soul was much more powerful, and again pushed a rod of light into my body. This time, however, it went above and below me, and had handholds like knots in a rope every few feet. When I asked who it was, I was asked back if it was important. No, I said, so I let it be. Later on, I thought it was Honi the Circler (a talmudic figure) and asked again. This time, he drew a circle for me. I asked him about how to get powerful and he said that in asking the question, I was preventing it from happening. That my motivations for becoming powerful were to impress others. I thought that I needed to become more modest, and he said no, that would happen on it's own. I needed to focus on learning, not self-aggrandizing, and I would move forward. Then he said he was done, and he was gone. He is definitely not a soul I can call, and I count myself blessed that he showed up.

I connected to Morgenstern then, and again, he was very far away. I realized that I could use the rod that Honi had put into my body like a ling shu, a spiritual pivot, to climb into the spiritual world. So I went up and found myself inside myself looking down at the room. I could see that Morgenstern didn't have spirits around him, as I suspected, telling him what to say (magidim), but instead was filled with divine light that gave him the inspiration. And that light emanated out into the room. Just like my friend had described. But I also realized that he wasn't getting anything back from the other people in the room.

Some people have a guru mentality, where they are nourished by the attention they receive from others. Some have a dark guru power where they take other's power to use as their own, thereby making the other people dependent on them. Morgenstern didn't seem to get anything from the people in the room. He was doing what he was doing, and some of the people in the room were taking from him, which I think must be hard on him, some were not connecting at all, and almost none were giving anything back to him. I can only think it must be very draining on him. I tried to figure out how I could give back to him and make it a two way connection, but I'm not sure I succeeded. It made me think it's time to meet him outside of these Motzei Shabbat (Saturday night) talks.